The two disciplines in education : an address delivered at the opening of the medical session, Mason University College, Birmingham / by Sir William T. Gairdner, M.D., K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.

  • Gairdner, W. T. (William Tennant), Sir, 1824-1907.
Date:
1899
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The two disciplines in education : an address delivered at the opening of the medical session, Mason University College, Birmingham / by Sir William T. Gairdner, M.D., K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    pioneer in “ that great movement which we call the Renaissance.” Dante, who was thirty-nine years old when Petrarch was bom in 1304, was the last great (and perhaps the greatest) figure of the middle age “ standing in the borderland between the darker ages and the revival, when he shows us a keen intellect and a sublime imagination moving within the limits, and obedient to the forms of mediceval thought.” “ At the further verge of the Renaissance” (and at quite two centuries distance from Dante) we have “ Erasmus, the life-long antagonist of the schoolmen, who makes so vivid to us the contrast between the intellectual atmosphere of scholasticism and that which the humane letters had created” (p. 6). And in these two centuries no one surely, will now attempt to deny that the human mind awoke as from a slumber, and entered on a new course of life and activity, as a consequence of the Italian revival in the 14th century. “ Petrarch’s ideal of humanism,” says Professor Jebb (p. 7) “as a discipline which aims at drawing out all the mental and moral faculties of man, pervades the whole course of the Italian Renaissance.” That this ideal was not always attained; that it was “often obscured by affectations or puerilities,” and “ not seldom belied by evil living”—a kind of revived Paganism, in short—Professor Jebb frankly admits. But, all the same, it was “areal force, which comes out more or less in all the greater and nobler of the humanists.” To all this, considered as the history of a great movement which began more than five hundred years ago, and has had an abiding influence on the educational methods of all European countries, one can readily assent, while maintaining, with Faraday, Huxley, and all the great scientific authorities of the present century, that the discipline of humanism requires now to be supplemented by a newer and different discipline; and this, not merely, and not chiefly, on account of the utili- tarian value of the latter, but in obedience to the very principle attributed to Petrarch, that education, in the large and liberal sense of the word, should be such as to “draw out all the mental and moral faculties of man.”